The Book Club Resolution

I started a book club.  I started a book club!  It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, as have a few friends of mine, so we rounded up a gang of readers (including some from this blogspace!) and last week we met for our first book club session.  I went the bossy route and picked our first book very undemocratically and told people what to read.

I’d first read The Stone Diaries years ago and upon “discovering” Carol Shields, I promptly made my way through the rest of her novels, and was moved – in a sort of melancholy way – by how beautifully and clearly she wrote about ordinary women, for lack of a better term.  (Ordinary meaning not noteworthy in the historical sense, not that we aren’t all special snowflakes with our own unique fingerprints, etc)

I wanted to begin book club with The Stone Diaries because I’ve been haunted by the notion of an invisible life ever since first reading the book, and it seemed like good fodder for discussion.  Daisy Stone is born at the beginning of the novel, dies at the end (not too much of a spoiler for those who haven’t read it; the book is the autobiography of a fictional character so birth and death stand to reason) and lives a fairly ordinary life in between those two events.  Others who have read the book can disagree or chime in with alternate points of view but my biggest takeaway from the book was how little of one’s life is ever known, chronicled, celebrated.  I like to think that everyone has a story, but discovering that story in oneself is a lifelong pursuit; discovering it in someone else seems like a damn miracle.  Documenting that story is where things get interesting: what do we leave behind, what impressions are left, what remains?

It was hard for me not to think about Daisy and wonder how she would have fared in the era of blogs.  Daisy herself was largely passive and made few calculated efforts to alter the course of her life, so I’m not sure she would been inclined to blog, but to me she represents so many women who spent an entire lifetime raising children and tending to a home, without any historical record of their lives.  I guess that’s sort of what I see as the main benefit of blogging – to bear witness.  I’m not a mom, definitely not a mommyblogger, but I get it.  I can see how comforting it might be to a mother to reach out and connect with other parents, and I also can see how it might offer validation for all the unseen work that goes into parenting.  It’s easy to think from the tedium or stress of an office job that working at home – as a parent, as a freelancer, as an artist – would be ideal, but I assume there must be some tree-in-the-forest fears that go along with it.  If nobody sees what I do, does it count?

On one of our first dates D. asked me the following question:  If you were given $50,000 for every week that you stayed inside your apartment – not leaving at all, although deliveries were permitted, as was cable and internet service – how long would you last?  I paused for a moment and calculated the hypothetical windfall before answering, “Two weeks.”  It should be noted that at the time, I was living in a 350 square foot studio apartment.  D. smirked and told me he could easily last six months, and would probably make it closer to a year.  He, at the time, was living in a 800 square foot apartment.  With a backyard.

Last week D. – from the floor of our dark, small living room which he has taken to calling “his jail” – said to me, “You know my question about $50,000 for every week you spend in your apartment?  I’m changing my answer.”   I asked him if this bout with unemployment has given him a greater appreciation for stay at home mothers and women over the years who always “just” stayed home.  Yes, he said, for sure.  It’s not easy being invisible.

People have written for ever and ever.  I was never a paper-journal-er and never felt comfortable with a diary until I realized you could write your diary entries on the internet and people might read them, and those same people might write back to you, and suddenly journaling seemed a lot more interesting to me.  Blogs have shifted into such a topical and sophisticated medium that I don’t consider myself a blogger.  I don’t even want to be one.  (Although the New York Times tells me that Dooce has a house with six bedrooms.  Six bedrooms!  I don’t want six bedrooms but reading that made me wish I had possibly tried a little harder as a blogger.)  What I like about writing online is that I’ve made connections and left my handprint, however faint, in this drying online cement.

I’m not sure that Daisy ever got a chance to leave her mark.  She had children, and they had children, and they had children, but Daisy herself never got to build a monument to her own life.  I am not at peace! are her last (unspoken) words, and I take from that disappointment and regret that she never made her own mark, never was able to say, I WAS HERE.

————-

So, book club:  It is happening!  One of the fun(ny) things about meeting in person was counting the different versions of the book read by different book clubbers.  We had Kindle and iPad readers, library books, borrowed books, editions of the book with “family” photos and books with a foreward but no pictures.  Also we had chocolate and wine and sandwiches and tea that smelled like apple muffins.  Next we are reading Room, which I assume the rest of you all read six months ago and which Amazon has been telling me to read for just as long so FINE, WORLD, I will read Room.

Settling In

My mantra in that week leading up to a move is “No matter what, it will get done.”  I warned D. that the days immediately before we moved were going to be ugly, what with all the loose ends and undone apartment and endless errand list.  I thought that giving him fair warning might earn me some slack (Hey, at least I know myself well enough to know that the night before a move, I am a disaster!) but I’m not sure that tactic worked out in my favor.  The thing is, No matter what, everything really does get done.  Every single move ends with a new home.  It always works out, no matter how impossible the task seems at 11pm the night before.  But regardless, it’s a drag.

There has been a lot of snow in NYC this winter so I devoted plenty of useless stress towards fretting over the weather.  We got pretty lucky; there was no snow the day of our move but it was bitterly cold, leaving every street in the city flanked by enormous frozen ice piles of plowed snow.  Garbage trucks have been on delayed schedules and were out in force the day of our move.  It was probably not a great day to be driving a giant moving truck around the city, is what I’m saying.  There was no parking and the truck had to keep moving, something the movers reminded me of at least twice an hour for the entire five hours it took them to pack up our apartment.

Luckily, while I stayed behind at our old (sniff!) apartment, D. had gone on ahead to the new digs and befriended the locals, several of whom helped him scout out (and shovel out) potential parking for the moving truck.  Our new block has a lot more, how shall I put it? local flavor than our old street.  The people on our street have lived there for ages; D. quickly made friends with Tom From Next Door who has lived in the building for 53 years, currently with his enormous Staffordshire Terrier, Portia.  (As a side note, one of my favorite things about D. is that no matter the circumstance, people seem to want to befriend him.  He has this motley assortment of friends he’s met at sports bars over the years and apparently the trait carries over to the stoop of our new building.  Our block has a cadre of guys who seem to mainly Hang Out, moving up and down the block from one stoop to another, and D. quickly made friends with them.  The Guys have got our back, now.)

So yadda yadda yadda moving unpacking strange upstairs neighbor lady walked into the apartment while the front door was still open and began fiddling with my stove and turning on all the burners and telling me – in Spanish, which I barely understand – a story that ended with her crying in my kitchen, and pantomiming being handcuffed.  Local flavor!

One of the best feelings is that moment when the movers leave and the door closes behind them and you are alone in your newly silent home.  I love that moment.  D. and I enjoyed it for about 13 seconds before attacking the boxes; when you move into a tiny space, you cannot ignore the boxes.  We reached a stopping point Saturday evening (stopping on Friday for the traditional Moving Night Pizza, of course) and that’s when the euphoria set in.  We ordered Thai food, I opened wine, we sat on our couch and turned on the TV (which in and of itself felt like a triumph, after some difficulties with the cable company) and I was overcome with a sense of giddy happiness.  THAT is the feeling I need to remember on the eve of my next move.  It always works out, and then there is Thai food.

Oh, and the dog!  We went down to the dog sitter’s last Saturday morning and walked a confused and slightly irritated Tuesday uptown for 35 blocks in a cold rain.  She was less than pleased.  But she has adjusted so, so well to the new apartment.  She very much enjoys the fluffy runner I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond, and likes the proximity to Riverside Park.  It’s her sixth apartment, if you can believe that, and she’s been a champ through this move, with nary a vomiting episode or hint of trepidation.

The apartment is still small.  The kitchen actually feels downright roomy when compared with my last kitchen, and courtesy of a few wire shelving units, it’s entirely put away and I don’t hate it.  The bedroom is tiny, but functional.  It’s not going to win any design awards but I feel triumphant every time I open the closet and see that I was able to fit my hanging wardrobe into such tight quarters.  The living room is tough; for one person it would be fine but when we’re both home, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to lounging.  We ditched our full size couch in the move and are down to one 60″ sofa, so there are not a lot of seating options, however a rug is on its way and once the floor is comfortably in play, our seating options multiply!  The bathroom is the worst part of the apartment (for me).  It’s tiny, there is no storage, and I didn’t even KNOW this was a thing but the one outlet in the bathroom doesn’t seem to have enough power (??) to allow me to run my flat iron (and the hair dryer only operates on its lowest power setting).  I’m still working out the kinks in my morning routine, but that’s been among the biggest so far.

I love the neighborhood.  Yes, our block is rough around the edges and yes, we installed a security gate on the window because everyone else seems to have one and I would rather be safe than sorry but overall, I like the location.  I love living near Columbia.  There are a million young people and lots of places to shop for groceries and the campus is beautiful, as is the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  My commute is longer.  We still don’t have a mail key.  There is a box of silverware under my dresser and my jeans and sweaters are in an armoire in the living room, but we’re making it work and getting used to it.  And the Thai food we ate on Saturday night was excellent, which makes me very, very happy.

Downsized

The Backstory

In hindsight, I’ve been exceedingly lucky, apartment-wise.  I’ve lived in: a duplex apartment in Carroll Gardens, the top floor of a brownstone in Carroll Gardens, a tiny walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, a garden apartment in Cobble Hill, a lofty condo in Cobble Hill, a cheery little studio on West 72nd Street and a bright, airy apartment in a doorman building on 74th Street right off Central Park West.  None of these apartments were extravagant or expensive by New York standards, but all have been places that felt like home, in one way or another.  I’ve been spoiled.  Our new apartment – which we’re moving into on Friday – has some, how shall we say? Design challenges.  It’s tiny, and it’s narrow, and it’s a bit on the run-down side of things.  Why on earth did we rent it? you might be asking.  We’ve been asking ourselves the same thing and the answer is three-part.

First, we were in the apartment for about five minutes with a real estate broker on a cold Sunday night and weren’t necessarily armed with measurements of all our belongings at the time, and we thought it would work.  Second, we had already seen about 20 apartments and believe it or not, the apartment we’re moving into was one of the better options.  And finally, because it’s what we can afford.

So D. and the dog and I are leaving our 700-ish square foot one bedroom apartment (which is by no means enormous, and has plenty of design challenges of its own) and squeezing into a barely-400 square foot apartment thirty blocks north.  It’s small, it’s dark, it’s narrow and in order to make it livable we’re putting some furniture in storage for the time being (see you in a year, custom made massive wine credenza that I cannot bear to sell!), but beyond all that: we’re going to make it work!  I am going lemonade the heck out of these lemons, and embrace Living Small.

The Challenge

The biggest challenge is storage.  The bathroom is so, so small.  Our current bathroom is small and I figured the one upside of moving would be that no matter what, we were bound to find a bigger bathroom.  Not so.  The new bathroom is so small that the toilet seat hits the wall if you try to lift it.  There is no storage.  There is a pedestal sink with about 9 inches of clearance between it and the wall, so that’s all the space I have to work with.  (I wanted to get an above-toilet shelving unit but we have less than 20 inches of space, and I haven’t seen anything that narrow.  Yet.)  We need some narrow stack-able drawers, dorm-style, to squeeze into that spot so that there is a place for toiletries, hair dryer, makeup.

The kitchen isn’t terribly small, but it’s awkward.  I want to get some industrial Metro shelving to create storage for cookware and dishes.  There’s not a lot of wall space to work and we can’t get anything deeper than 14 inches as we need to allow for clearance of the refrigerator door, so Plan B  is a wall mounted pot rack and making careful use of whatever vertical space we can eek out of the tops of the cabinets.

The bedroom is narrow – just 89 inches wide.  Our bed just fits crosswise in the bedroom and with our dressers, the space is pretty much maximized.  We’re going to be making use of the space under the bed for sure, and in our tiny closets (there are two closets, each less than two feet wide) we’re in dire need of shoe storage options.  One improvement I’ve made is in hangers: those Slimline hangers that can be hooked and tiered 2 or 3 at a time have given me several precious inches of space.  All hail Slimline hangers!

The entire apartment is connected by a long, narrow hallway.  All of the rooms are off the hallway to the right, with the bedroom in the back.  We had initially thought the hallway was wide enough to accommodate furniture (bookshelves, an old pie safe I use for linens, etc) but it ended up being too narrow (hence decision to store some furniture and give us a little breathing space).  I’ve never lived in an apartment with such distinct rooms; I can’t say yet whether it’s a good thing or not.  Perhaps – perhaps! – it will become charming, once we are settled.

The Goal

I am determined to prove that small can be beautiful, and that barring beauty, it can at least be comfortable.  D. and I have already said to one another that there is no one either of us would rather be stuck with in a tiny cave of an apartment than each other, so we’re going to make it work, inexpensively as neither of us want to live any longer than necessary in this funky little shoebox.

Eyes Forward

My philosophy with regards to New Year’s Resolutions is grounded firmly in the attainable; I believe in making small – but real – changes.  Drink more water.  Use fewer paper towels.  Floss daily.  Go to bed 15 minutes earlier.  Etcetera.  Last year my main resolution was to talk to a financial advisor/invest my ‘divorce money’ in order to start planning for Later.   Not as sexy as resolving to, oh, acquire more stamps in my passport, but it needed to be done, and I did it.

I don’t want to reflect too much on 2010 because, well, it was not awesome and instead prefer to look forward.  (I save looking backwards for birthdays; much easier to panic about What Have I Done With My Life when there are no New Year’s Eve celebrations to distract!)  In 2011, I hope to do the following:

1.  Start a book club.  If you are somewhat interesting, somewhat bookish, somewhat laid back with regards to Rules (book talk good, homework bad, no need to show off on the hostessing front) and live in NYC, email me!

2.  Find a tailor/make my pants fit better.  I know everyone thinks she has the hardest time finding pants that fit, but in fact, it’s me.  No, that is not hyperbole.  Okay yes, it’s hyperbole, but my pants never fit.  I have no curves so everything always sags and seems too big even when it can’t possibly be too big.  Regardless of weight fluxuations, I remain curve-less and somehow when I am at the lower end of my weight range, things fit WORSE.  This does not seem fair, and I need to find a way to leave the house in pants that fit.  I’m told there are professionals who do just this, and what’s more, that they are readily available in the city of New York.  If you have a good tailor, please send recommendations my way.

3.  Cook outside my comfort zone.  I cook a lot, and I enjoy it and am confident in my skills and ability as long as I stick to certain cuisines and ingredients.  My comfort zone barely reaches India and Southeast Asia, and I’d like to gain more proficiency in cooking dishes from those regions.  This may involve turning to the one thing I hate (recipes), but so be it.

4.  Get a library card.  I’m a little ashamed that I don’t have a library card but my excuse is that the NYPL is intimidating.  (I never said it was a good excuse).  I resolve to visit a neighborhood branch (as opposed to the main branch at Bryant Park which I’ve been in once or twice and which is intimidating, I swear!) and on occassion put down my Kindle in order to read free books.

ATTAINABLE!

As for New Year’s Eve itself, I think we’ll be ringing it in with fondue and wine and a few episodes of Breaking Bad, which I am finally able to watch thanks to AMC re-airing the series from the beginning.  Oh, how I have hated being excluded from the Breaking Bad conversation these past few years.

Cheers, internet!

Not a Creature Was Stirring

It’s Christmas Eve day.  Tonight I’m taking D. out to dinner for what I long ago decided – come hell, high water, etc – is my Christmas Eve tradition: one lovely meal.  It’s not that we haven’t had our fair share of lovely meals throughout the year, or that I haven’t prepared perfectly lovely food here in our home, but on a night that is all about anticipation – even now, even here, even knowing Santa will not be landing on our roof and somehow making his way down through the building – there is something wonderful about heading out in the New York City night and walking down quiet streets with Christmas lights twinkling through windows.  New York behaves well on Christmas Eve, I’ve found, and it’s a night on which I very much enjoy raising a glass and toasting to us, all of us.

We’re eating dinner in SoHo and then coming home to our Upper West Side apartment; tomorrow we’ll spend Christmas the way we’ve spent the past few holidays — cooking, eating, taking the dog on a long walk in Central Park.  This is the third holiday season that I’ve spent with D. and I suppose I am somewhat sensitive to our relatively short history together.  The traditions we do have are worth their weight in gold to  me.

It’s been a blessing to live up here these past few years.  I loved living in Brooklyn.  I still miss Brooklyn.  But I moved to this neighborhood at a low, low point in my life and didn’t really know what to expect.  I can’t say that I’ve fallen in love with the Upper West Side, necessarily, but I have truly loved living here.  It feels like our neighborhood.  D. and I walked home from the east side yesterday afternoon, through the park, and I told him how lucky I feel for having been able to live adjacent to a place like Central Park.  This probably sounds very Frommer’s Guide to New York, but it’s a pretty spectacular place.  Visitors who have their own backyards and parks and open spaces may not appreciate it, but for those of us who live in cramped, dense, sometimes frustratingly crowded cities, the value of this park cannot be overstated.  You can get lost in it, and I said to D. that along with feeling lucky for living near the park, I feel like I use the park, every day.  I have gone for many runs in the park, long walks with the dog, I’ve sunbathed and read and met friends and gone to concerts and cut through on my way to the east side.  I’ve cheered marathoners and eaten hot dogs and seen polar bears and attended weddings in the park.  I’ll say it again: living here has been a blessing.

I’m feeling bittersweet, because on Tuesday morning we got a knock on our door and opened it to find a woman from our building’s management company, informing us that the management company has decided to combine our apartment with a newly-vacated apartment next door, and our lease renewal was being rescinded.  She was very sorry.

If I sound overly dramatic about having to move, I apologize.  Certainly moving is not that big of a deal.  People move all the time, people in New York really move all the time, and under normal circumstances, it’s a blip, an inconvenience, a pain in the ass and later, an anecdote to add to the inevitable real estate chat that happens at basically every social gathering in the city.  But damn, you guys…I don’t want to move.  I moved in February of 2007.  And February of 2008.  And February of 2009.  When February of 2010 came around, I relished NOT moving.  And now I’m moving again, in February of 2011.

I crave a home.  I know a home is composed of more than walls and rugs and mailboxes.  My home is with D. and my dog and we will be fine, no matter where we live.  But I have bought and sold and abandoned and reclaimed furniture so many times that it’s hard to feel much attachment for anything, but I want some attachments.  I hate looking around our apartment – which we LOVE, despite the fact that it has the world’s smallest bathroom and world’s second smallest kitchen – and wondering what furniture will have to be ditched in this next move.  Our situation is complicated by D’s unemployment; I can’t speak for all rentals but NYC requires most renters to make 40 times the monthly rent in order to qualify for an apartment, and our household income is down by 2/3 compared to when we last signed a lease.  So, the irritating but manageable hassle of moving has morphed into a bit of a beast for us.  Obviously we will not end up homeless, but holy crap I am worried that we will end up living in a studio apartment.

It seems like I’ve been in a bad mood for oh, three months.  My goal for Christmas Eve, for the rest of the holiday season, for 2011, is to let go of that bad mood.  My goodness, have I gown sick of this bad mood.  (D. is napping but I think I just heard him raise a fist in solidarity with that statement.)

Christmas Eve is not about bad moods.  It’s about possibility and anticipation and raising a glass to all things lovely.  To us, and to you.  To all of us.

Merry Christmas!

The Sad Trombone Post I Will Probably Delete Next Week

I was poor in my early 20s.  I moved to New York with negative $2 in my bank account and spent the next year or so playing a game of chicken with my overdraft protection.  I didn’t go out.  The 22 year olds I see in magazines today seem so sophisticated; they are glam and leggy and dressed in cocktail dresses, drinking $18 drinks and could not be further from my life at their age.  I lived with actors and we were all broke.  My roommates worked nights waiting tables and I was up early to be at my office job and sure, we went out for beers but also hung out at home and rented movies and sometimes went out to dinner in our Carroll Gardens neighborhood, then just beginning to acquire its real estate glow, back before Brooklyn was an adjective and entrees were $28.

I remember distinctly the first time I bought a pair of shoes that cost over $100.  I was working at a large financial institution as a research assistant and starting to dig my way out of debt, little by little.  I went to Macy’s one night and bought a pair of grey square-toe Kenneth Cole stacked-heel loafers.  I used to stare at them: Grown up shoes, I thought.  I have a pair of grown up shoes.

I was lucky enough to be working at that firm when it went public, and as part of the IPO I was granted stock options.  Had I held onto those options, I would be…well, things would be different.  But I had accrued credit card debt in my early 20s and so as the options vested, I sold and paid off my student loans (because even a B.A. from a public university is expensive!) and credit card debt.  I think about those stock options sometimes, but honestly, I did what I needed to do at a time when I felt financially pressed.  I did not want to enter my marriage carrying any debt, and I didn’t.

In my early 20s there were times I would walk home to save subway fare.  There was one evening when I walked from the Financial District to SoHo for a doctor’s appointment and then walked home afterward, because I had less that $20 to my name and needed it for the co-pay.  I know what it feels like to have no money.

The stress I felt then, however, is nothing like what I feel now.  Back then, being poor felt appropriate and temporary and while I was living paycheck to paycheck, I didn’t have much to lose and I was making it work, as best I could.  At 35, the stress is very, very different.

I have a job with as much job security as one can hope for in 2010.  I have savings.  I don’t want to dip into it, but it’s there.  D. and I are not in danger of becoming homeless.  But he’s unemployed, and the situation is grim.  There is some comfort in knowing we are not in this alone, but there is also the (shameful, childish) thought, “I knew it couldn’t be that easy.”  It seemed too perfect: meeting D. and falling in love and moving in together, just like that.  D. found out he lost his job as we were apartment-hunting, and 19 months later, the job front remains discouraging.  New York is an expensive place to live and while one option would be for us to move out of the city, that would mean incurring new expenses: we’d have to buy a car, take the commuter train which is considerably more expensive than the subway.  My job is here, and to leave the city entirely doesn’t make sense right now.

Seeing the emotional toll unemployment is taking on my partner is heartbreaking, exhausting, frustrating.  I have never wanted anything as much as I want to make this better.

We joke about the piano on his chest, but the truth is that we are both weighed down by this roadblock and we are both nervous and all I want – what I want more than anything else – is to see the person I love happy again, but we’re still in the thick of things and if you’ve wondered why I have not been writing as much these days, that’s why.  I hate being the broken record of negativity, but things are tough right now.

But they will get better.  I believe it.  I do.  I know at this very minute many of you are wringing your hands over similar problems, or over totaly dissimilar but equally terrifying and frustrating problems.  I know you are struggling, and worrying, and hoping.

It will get better.

Advice

If you happen upon some Heirloom Tomatoes, buy a bunch of them (I’m bad at measurements but enough to fill a bag) and don’t worry if they are ugly and lumpy.  About an hour and a half before you want to eat dinner, core the tomatoes, cut them in half, squoosh out the seeds (a suggestion: squoosh the seeds into a strainer set over a bowl so you get bonus tomato juice) and dump the tomatoes in a roasting pan.  Cover them with sprinkles of chopped garlic (2-3 cloves), salt, pepper and fresh basil and then pour a few glugs of olive oil over the whole mess.  Roast the tomatoes for 45 minutes or so at 350 degrees, and when things smell amazing, take out the tomatoes, dump them in a bowl (or blender) and puree (I use an immersion blender.  Note: ALWAYS UNPLUG BEFORE MAKING ANY ATTEMPTS TO DISLODGE GOO FROM THE IMMERSION BLENDER BLADES!  I received 5 stitches last year that second the warning.).  Take some sausage (I have a cased-meat crush on the sweet Italian sausage that the Grazin’ Angus guys sell at the farmer’s market) and remove from casings (yes, I know it sort of feels dirty and hand-jobby sometimes).  Brown the sausage in a saute pan and then add about 1/2 cup of white wine to deglaze.  Let it simmer, then add your tomato puree (and de-seeded juice from earlier) and a dash of salt and pepper.  Simmer and let the whole mess reduce (about 20 minutes, or until it looks and tastes right).  In the meantime, cook up some pasta.  I am not the sort of person who makes my own pasta, so I buy fresh noodles from the egg lady at the farmer’s market and am partial to the spinach fettucine.  Cook the pasta, drain, and then add to your sauce.  Stir it all together, turn off the burner, and then eat it all up.

Keep a spare pair of flip flops and a spare pair of heels at your desk.  When you get called in unexpectedly to Very Important Meetings and are wearing jeans, put on the heels and you will instantly feel better about walking into that conference room.  If you are breaking in new flats that have ripped the back of your heels TO BLOODY SHREDS by 8:37 am, grab those flip flops and wear them under your desk, and on the walk home.

If you have a few spare minutes, go through your cell phone contact list and make a damn spreadsheet with everyone’s phone numbers.  At some point you will lose your phone (perhaps in Hanoi, at midnight, as you are about to board a kajillion hour flight home) or drop it in a beer (what, that happens) and as easy as it is to post the ubiquitous Facebook status update asking for phone numbers, the spreadsheet means you never have to worry why certain people never bothered sending you their numbers.

Every now and then, buy an extra box of tampons, even if you don’t need them.  Man, does it feel good knowing you have plenty of tampons, just in case.

If you want your perfume to linger longer, apply fragrance-free moisturizer and then spray perfume on your pulse points; the moisturizer will help the scent adhere.

The best money you ever spend will be the money you pay movers.  I suppose it depends on where you live and what sort of housing situation (and obviously financial situation) you have, but hear this: movers are efficient, strong, and bonded.  I don’t have any credit card debt but I would carry a balance before I’d move myself.  IT IS THE BEST MONEY YOU WILL EVER SPEND.

White Collar on the USA Network will cure your malaise.  Freaks & Geeks is being rerun on IFC and it gets better every time.  DVR both of them for that block of time on Sunday afternoon when it feels like the weekend is over but the night hasn’t really started and you’re not sure what to do with yourself other than worry about what you’re going to wear to work and are feeling bad about skipping yoga that morning but not so bad that you’ll go to the 4:30 class.